


There Is A House Built Out Of Stone

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: Where I Don't Feel Alone [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: And unable to process emotions, Angst, Canon Divergence, Denial of Feelings, Falling In Love, Hux is thirsty, Kylo is worried about his General, Kylux - Freeform, Longing, Mutual Pining, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 01:56:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18201935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: The General and Snoke's apprentice fight minor war after minor war to ensure the ongoing success of the First Order. How they feel about things, including one another, doesn't come into it, right?Set apart from the films, this is just something I wrote for Boysnextdoor, to say thank you for their amazing 'Victory Tour' series.Please consider kudos and comments! It's how we keep going!!!





	There Is A House Built Out Of Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Boysnextdoor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boysnextdoor/gifts).



It had been a dispiriting little thing, as wars go. 

The bombast of the antique regime had pricked Hux’s modernism, had goaded his coldly purring destroyers into devastating the primary cities. 

The constant, avoidable atrocities, the local criminal opportunism have all been very wearying.

Hux wants, badly, to bury himself in the waves of Ren’s hair, the dark haven he covets, the shadow that falls between his lordship’s jawline and throat. 

Or, drink himself into victorious oblivion. 

Neither behaviour seems appropriate for a reconstruction briefing. 

“The conflagrations will be extinguished, order will be restored,” he informs his captains. “If there is to be chaos, then it will be _our_ chaos, leashed and loyal.”

He wonders from which handbook he has recalled that phrase, and whether he did so because Ren has just leaned, insolently, right across him. 

His heart thuds and roils with both lead and mercury; the trooper distribution ratios anchor his pulse somewhat, even when Ren meddles about with his calculations in front of lesser officers. 

“The insurgents are using photon accelerants, so scour the nearest core mines for any nanogranular suppressors.” He ignores the brush of a bicep, and stares doggedly at the screen. “And do it all _loudly_ , so that what is left of the population understands _exactly_ who is saving them from the pyre they lit beneath their own backsides.”

There is a tremor of applause. 

There are tremors in Hux’s hands. 

Ren looms, watching, and Hux’s body is misfiring, but if he swallows one more chemical balancer he will likely melt all over the deck. 

Held upright by his greatcoat, Hux leaves, longing to place himself out of consciousness, therapeutically, until the next meeting. Until the hard paw of a droid shakes him awake, necessarily needling him, rousing him from dreams he should not be dreaming. 

The corridors seem unduly narrow. He thinks of every one he has ever walked along, laid end to end, and his breathing feels like it could break his chest apart. 

“Stop.” Ren’s voice is too naked, without the distortion of the mask. 

Hux hates it.

“Not now.” He can’t turn around. He does not have sufficient defences at his disposal to _not_ make a fool of himself. Not to command a kiss, a touch, a fuck. 

“Please.” It’s a supplication. Not an order. They pass a huddle of technicians and the intimate tone hardens. “You have stacked your shifts one atop the other _again_ , General, despite my warnings,” Ren continues in the accusing way that Hux finds infinitely easier to process. “I checked the logs. This is why I find you paler. Thinner. Is defiance of my advice worth your own disintegration?”

“I do not delegate work I can do best myself.” Hux fumbles the code to the door. A filthy hand actions the override. 

He is followed into his rooms by the black cloud of material, the persistent thrum of energy, the scent of the battle just won, down there in the heat and the death. It is drugging, unrelenting, it makes Hux itch within the pristine prison of his uniform. 

“You were on every watch during my mission,” Ren perseveres. “You asked personally after my status. Several times. Can you explain this?”

“To note your recklessness. To anticipate your demise.”

“Yet when I am here, before you, I am still disdained. Unwelcome.”

“Because you sully my ship, coming here, _covered_ in your _kills_ …”

“I am returned to you from duty...” 

“…and I do not wish to have your…your _muck_ all over me.” Hux nearly shouts. Blinks. The lie of _that_ must surely bloom, bright as a star.

To be covered in Ren, is, at times, his _only_ ambition. 

Ren flushes, the fierceness of it slipping down beneath his torn collar. “Do not ask me to apologise for the honesty of my appearance. We cannot all smell so clean, of sweet tea and soap. We cannot all…glow, like an ember, and moonlight on snow.”

There is silence. 

Ren is standing by Hux’s bunk, scorched and smeared with who knows what. His eyes rest on the prim grey corner-tucks, the smooth virginity of the sheets. 

“Well?” Hux puts ice where he feels naught but flame. “What would you have of me?”

Ren glances about, in that maddeningly unhurried way he has, as if he is never sure of his own realities. 

Hux has nothing, really, to look _at_. Technical guides and treatises, empty bottles of stimulant. His quarters are not a home. He is a passenger in his own life. Adrift. Drowning for decades. He finds some dregs in a flask and pours himself out a strong drink.

“You made...mistakes in your deployment calculations,” Ren states, cautiously. “If I had not pretended to disagree, to alter them before they were analysed properly…”

Hux frowns. “You came to crow, then? Or choke me? Or throw me against a wall?” 

A flare of displeasure bursts against Hux, a tidal wave in his half-full cup, a forcing forward of frustration. 

And Ren might be right to react this way; that particular _contact_ has not happened for a long while. In whichever ways they are set one against the other, they have made for themselves a truce. 

It is tacit, and possibly treasonable. 

But it has held; these last several conflicts have not been _theirs_ , at least.

“I came to see if an important cog in the machinery can be made operational once again,” Ren murmurs. 

_Rage makes one unwise_. Another handbook gem.

“Oh?” Hux takes off his hat and coat. Undoes some buttons, too stiffly to be properly seductive. As if he hadn’t repaired himself, all the scratches and fractures, alone, his entire life. “And what do you propose? By way of _servicing_ me?” 

There is a startled tilt to Ren’s expression, to the air itself. Hux unfurls his fists, because the _reciprocation_ of the childish, sneering suggestion ripples straight back to him. 

Stubbornly, desire sparks. There has been a vacuum that has replaced the violence; Hux imagined it would suffocate him, eventually. 

He has stepped around the desk before he realises what he is about. 

Ren drifts closer, too. Wary. He appears disconcerted. “I am to have a…a place.” He may as well have said temple, may as well have said _cage_. These are the images that Hux tentatively receives. “I am to… _build_ …a place. I was reborn, I have no homeworld, so it seems I am to be assigned one. A symbolic permanency, rising from the ashes I have helped make, down there, planetside.” 

He licks his lower lip. “I ask that you assist in the construction.” 

“What?” Hux barks, but softly. “More propaganda, Ren? Is conquest not enough for our Leader? Must we squat in the mire amongst these people too?” 

Hux sees now the pigments besides the dull red upon Ren’s skin, his clothing. 

Chlorophyll green. Ochre. An earthy umber to complement those odd, raw eyes. He surmises that a plot has already been chosen on which they are to frolic, two monsters, all claws, all teeth, biting and tearing for Snoke’s entertainment. 

Hux scrubs at his hair. He is tired. He aches. “I wonder to what end I am made to orbit you, my lord.”

“Before you were a military leader, you were an engineer.” Ren shrugs, stepping nearer still, his expression unguarded, conspiratorial, even if his words are not. “Our master no doubt hopes that your health will benefit from sitting in the sunshine, sketching out schematics, and that you will continue to be a credit to his cause.”

It would take but an outstretched arm, an ordinary movement of bone and muscle, no wizardry at all, to bring them into alignment. 

Hux is hardly aware of his fingertips, lifting to clear away a smudge on Ren’s cheek. His reaction is clear, and irreversible, as is Ren’s, but he scowls anyway. “I have no time for these frivolities.”

“Do you refuse me?” It is a whisper, low and heavy and ripe with all meaning.

Hux doesn’t move, or speak; his answer is a sun, a mad and blazing thing, in the drab steel space. 

And Ren is so terribly close to smiling. 

The comms crackle. Of course.

“It is agreed, then,” Ren wraps his hand in Hux’s hand. It is a brief, official handshake, nothing more. “I will expect you on site after your full rest cycle has been observed, General.”

He is very stern, and not remotely playful, and Hux nods, this time. Looks down, lest he _laugh_ out loud.

He is full of apprehension, exhaustion, but also, something else.

It is not a concept dealt with much in any of his manuals.

But Hux thinks it could very well be _hope_.


End file.
